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General Kenneth Nichols and the Manhattan Project
Nichols
The Oak Ridger has published the latest in a series of articles about General Kenneth D. Nichols, the Manhattan Project, and the 1954 Atomic Energy Act. The series has been produced by Nichols’ grandniece Barbara Rogers Scollin and Oak Ridge (Tenn.) city historian David Ray Smith. Gen. Nichols (1907–2000) was the district engineer for the Manhattan Engineer District during the Manhattan Project.
As Smith and Scollin explain, Nichols “had supervision of the research and development connected with, and the design, construction, and operation of, all plants required to produce plutonium-239 and uranium-235, including the construction of the towns of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Richland, Washington. The responsibility of his position was massive as he oversaw a workforce of both military and civilian personnel of approximately 125,000; his Oak Ridge office became the center of the wartime atomic energy’s activities.”
Siegfried W. Cierjacks, Pavel ObloŽinský, Stefan Kelzenberg, Bernhard Rzehorz
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 24 | Number 3 | November 1993 | Pages 277-287
Technical Paper | Nuclear Data | doi.org/10.13182/FST93-A30202
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A new algorithm and three major nuclear data libraries were developed for the kinematically complete treatment of sequential (x,n) reactions infusion material activation calculations. The new libraries include data for virtually all isotopes with Z≤ 84 (A ≤ 210) and half-lives exceeding 1 day; primary neutron energies En < 20 MeV; and secondary charged particles x = p, d, t, 3He, and α with energies Ex < 24 MeV. While production cross sections of charged particles for primary (n,x) reactions can be deduced from the European activation file, the KFKSPEC data file was created for the corresponding normalized charged-particle spectra. The second data file, KFKXN, contains cross sections for secondary (x,n) reactions. The third data file, KFKSTOP, has a complete set of differential ranges for all five aforementioned light charged particles and all elements from hydrogen to uranium. The KFKSPEC and KFKXN libraries are based essentially on nuclear model calculations using the statistical evaporation model superimposed with the pre-equilibrium contribution as implemented in the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory ALICE code. The KFKSPEC library includes 633 isotopes, of which 55 are in their isomeric states, and contains 63 300 spectra of the (n,x) type with almost 1.5 million data points. The KFKXN library also includes 633 isotopes and contains all (x,n) and partly (x,2n) cross sections for 4431 reactions with ∼106 000 data points. The KFKSTOP library is considered complete and has 11040 data points.